Thursday, January 10, 2013

Picture Imperfect

No need to Google it.This is a Stygimoloch.

My silhouette portrait taunted me for years.

My mom made portraits
of all four of us kids when we were very young and hung them on the
dining room wall. Mine was the only one with the Dennis-the-Menace
cowlick sticking straight out of the back of my head. I looked like a
Stygimoloch.

One day when my mother was replacing the faded
construction paper backdrop, I begged her to fix the imperfection. After
a lot of foot-stomping (on my part--I was around 10 years old at the
time), she cropped it--and I knew immediately that I’d screwed up. This
new and improved portrait was a fugazi.

But apparently Stalin-izing a photo for a more perfect version of reality is no big deal in the digital age.

House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi defended her decision to photoshop four congresswomen into the sort-of official photo of the women of the 113th Congress as, “an accurate historical record of who the Democratic women of Congress are."

An accurate record? Perhaps. An accurate depiction of reality? No.

It's almost never a good idea to improve on an original.

There are a couple of important lessons to be learned from Pelosi's
Kodak moment. First, if you plan to edit a photo, understand that the
original will pop up moments after you upload the forgery. The Internet never
forgets. And it doesn’t like a cheater.

Second, if you must photoshop your
pictures, tell your audience that you did. Be specific. And attach that
disclaimer to the photo every time you post it. People will not be happy
if they think they’ve been lied to.

And finally, get an expert. These gals looklike they're seven feet tall.